Anti-abortion groups take page from NRA playbook

Even before Roe v. Wade, there was the National Right to Life Committee.

On this 40th anniversary of the landmark abortion decision, the NRLC remains the biggest anti-abortion group. But other groups have risen to claim the voice of the movement. Some, like Susan B. Anthony List, Americans United for Life and Concerned Women for America have brought on board a new generation of younger anti-abortion activists who are media-savvy, skilled at fundraising and able to extend the reach of the movement deep into statehouses and on ballots nationwide.

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And even though the ultimate goal of outlawing abortion and overturning Roe v. Wade remains unrealized, this hodgepodge of groups can point to a continuous string of state-level laws across the nation restricting the procedure as evidence that they are winning partial victories along the way.

In a divided Washington, new abortion-related bills are guaranteed to go nowhere. That doesn’t diminish the scramble to raise money for the anti-abortion movement, and it hasn’t slowed the growth of the disparate groups and their constant effort to keep up a 40-year-old fight. The groups have found niches from which they broaden their attack.

“There is a symmetry to the pro-life side,” Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said. “Where one group ends another one begins. [SBA List doesn’t] have a team of lawyers drafting legislation, we are happy for organizations like AUL [to do that] … We trust them to do their job, and then our job as the political arm is to advance those measures.”

Even some of their pro-abortion rights adversaries see the division of labor as a sign of the movement’s sophistication.

“The [pro-]choice women have always had this enormous array of different types of groups … we’ve had the lawyers, we’ve had the providers, we’ve had the electoral front, we’ve had the women’s groups,” said Frances Kissling, former head of the abortion rights group Catholics for Choice. “As any effective movement would do, [the anti-abortion groups] have come up with a multiplicity of strategies that they didn’t have before.”

Tactically, they’ve also learned from the political tactics of the NRA, said SBA List’s Dannenfelser. “The most important thing that we’ve done is operate a little like the NRA does. … the ‘votes have consequences’ piece of the whole thing,” she said in an interview. “There’s a sense that they’re always watching.” Anti-abortion groups now similarly monitor lawmakers’ abortion-related votes and make sure they get plenty of attention during campaign season.